John (ok you got me, he’s real name is not John) used to be teased by his classmates at school. He was engineering his own scanner using a Commodore 64 printer and a bunch of light sensitive wires when he was 10. Don’t ask me how he did it.

His parents thought he’d never get too far without social skills, which he clearly didn’t have. He ended up dropping school one year before finishing and working for a local PC repair shop. After a few months he started programming in various languages and working on freelance projects. He had more work than he could chew but he struggled with project managing his own time, plus he was underpricing his own services. He was buried in work and earning just enough to make rent.

He barely saw the light of day, had no friends except for a few bunch of weirdos like him, and everyone else felt pretty good about themselves giving him a hard time. “I’ve always said so, John can be a genious with those machines but he’ll never make it far without good social skills and emotional intelligence.” His idea of fun was to get with his friends and dress up like this:

That’s until he stumbled upon SEO. In 1998 he got heavily into web development. He realized how easy it was to optimize these pages for the search engines and get a lot of traffic. He kept researching and realized he could actually make money doing this. Long story short. John is one of many succesful SEOs who makes more than $500K a year. He drives an Aston Martin like the one below:

He makes his own hours, drives his kids to school, and pretty much does what he wants. The cool kids that used to make fun of him are all useful jerks, tied up to jobs and mortgages that they’ll finish paying the day that Matt Cutts quit talking about paid links.

All the Marketing girls from corporate firms keep flirting with him trying to get him to sign up with them. John thanks them and excuse himself for being too busy to do any consulting work. Then he smiles and remembers when the same kind of girls used to make fun of him at school.

Derrick: there are many unkown SEOs making a lot more than 500k a year. A lot of them don’t blog, don’t consult and don’t have a name you would be familiar with.

Word Hugger: that’s not really the point of the post, but money does free your time so you have the freedom to live you life how you want it. Whether you can find happiness with that freedom or not it’s entirely up to you.

This story is exactly what I probably most like about seo – this is the story that those that claim it snake oil will never truly know or appreciate. I always love when Louis got Betty to turn nerd too. I wish I WOULD have hung around more nerds back in school, and I’d probably be on that beach by now, and would have been plugged in a few years earlier.